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Nancy Henderson crunches numbers as an accountant. But other roles stir her passion: Master builder, carpenter, architect, interior designer — all in miniature.

The Plymouth woman builds dollhouses, and not simple boxes slapped with a coat of paint. These little homes, one-twelfth the size of real houses, rival scenes from a home design magazine. If little dolls held holiday house tours, hers would be the home everyone would want a look inside. They are small enough to sit on a side table in her workshop, yet large enough for her to appoint with kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms and even attics full of tiny toys.

Henderson builds with nails the size of eyeglass screws, covers counters with scraps of linoleum and discovered that binder clips make great hinges for doors and cabinets.

Brass nuts, bolts and washers fitted with little bitty bulbs and shaded with soda bottle caps become table lamps. Four wooden cups with bases soon will be cut into table legs.

With little bits of sand paper, tweezers, razor blades, a host of Dremel attachments, a tack hammer and glue, Henderson works in rooms the size of shoe boxes. Even 12 to 14 hour days at her Main Street office during tax season can't keep her from coming home to her loft workshop and working before bed.

"This is a good break," she said of her tiny home building. "It is a good stress reliever."

Though furniture, sinks, refrigerators and nearly any household item can be found in a shrunken size on the Internet, Henderson avoids kits. She starts much of what she makes, such as a replica of a shaker table, a plaster of Paris bathtub and sofas, from scratch. "The premade pieces are not as realistic looking," she said. "They are not as concerned with scale."

For an accountant, scale is everything. "I try to make it as realistic as possible," she said. "I'd like to take a picture of a room and have people say 'Is that real or is that a dollhouse?'"

A quick glance into the rooms of a completed pale-yellow dollhouse on display at the Terryville Public Library provides that same double-take sensation. For months, Henderson worked to refurbish the Victorian style, two-story home found at a Bristol auction by Friends of the Library members Cathy Paskus and Sandy Klimkoski last year.

The house stood weathered by years of little fingers at the Boys and Girls Club in Bristol. Paskus and Klimkoski thought they could use it to raise money for the library, and showed it to Henderson. They never imagined how it would turn out. It is no longer a toy. It is a conversation piece.

"It was blue, it was broken, the furniture was broken," Paskus said. What furniture wasn't broken was missing.

Now the mini mansion, as it is known at the library, will be raffled off Dec. 8. Tickets are $5.

The home has lights, a new kitchen with black-and-white checkered floor and a loaf of Wonder Bread on the counter, two plush bedrooms, an attic filled with treasures and a newspaper at the front door. Using a ruler with tiny holes every 1/64 of an inch, Henderson carefully measures with an extra sharp architects pencil over and over to ensure she is correct before trimming, cutting or gluing anything into place.

Nothing is glued until she is 100 percent satisfied, she said.

"In full scale, being off 2 of an inch isn't an issue," she said. "But 2 of an inch in this is like being off a foot."

In her cozy loft, as rays of sun beamed through a skylight, Henderson on a recent afternoon waited for glue to dry after installing electrical tape through a two-story dollhouse under construction.

Through it electricity will power lights.

In August, she won first price at the Terryville Fair for a dollhouse, a model of her home, which is a former one-room schoolhouse.

She won the prize, then tore it apart. It is gutted and a dormer was added for an attic bedroom. "The fun is changing and remodeling," she said. She always wants to do more.

"The only thing I haven't mastered yet is plumbing," Henderson said. "I don't have water in any of them."

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No mortgage needed: Friends of the Terryville Library in a drawing will give away Nancy Henderson's realistic dollhouse on Dec. 8 during Santa Claus' visit to the library. Tickets cost $5 and can be bought at the library, 238 Main St. The winner need not be present to win.

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lisechase wrote on Nov 23, 2012 11:26 AM:

" Wonderful! I am enthralled by Henderson's creative energy with her doll houses. I came on-line to see more photos (as promised in print), but I can't find them. Even the article is incorrectly entitled on-line; instead of "Better Building in Miniature," it's"It's a doll..."I finally found it by looking up Alec Johnson. So how can I find more photos? Thank you.Lise "

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